Whatever happened on flight BA77 on Tuesday night, the death of Jimmy Mubenga is likely to place a spotlight on Britain's deportation techniques. The 46-year-old is thought to be the first person to have died in the process of being deported for 17 years.

The last death – that of Joy Gardner, who police tried to restrain in her north London flat – proved hugely inflammatory. She was bound and gagged by police using 13 feet of sticky tape as she resisted their attempts to deport her in July 1993.

A jury found two police officers not guilty of her manslaughter during a trial two years later. The officers said that Gardner, aged 40, had become extremely violent.

Her death stirred up community tension in an area of north London that had only recently recovered from the Broadwater Farm estate riots in 1985.

Since then deportation has remained highly controversial. In a report produced for the Home Office in March this year, Lady Nuala O'Loan found complaints about abuse during detention were not being properly investigated and that private security firms were not adequately managing the use of force by their staff.

Her inquiry was prompted by a report in 2008, in which medical practitioners and lawyers documented what they said was "widespread and seemingly systematic abuse" of detainees being forcibly deported by private contractors. O'Loan did not share that particular finding.

However she clearly sympathised with some concerns raised by the report's authors, which included Birnberg Peirce, Medical Justice and the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns. O'Loan looked in detail at 29 of the 48 cases in which complaints had been made and found an inadequate or no investigation at all had been carried out by UK Border Agency in 18 cases.

In some cases staff were shown not to have even considered whether the use of force had been "proportionate or necessary" before applying handcuffs or other restraint techniques.

The 2008 report, Outsourcing Abuse, evaluated 300 allegations of assaults during deportations between 2004 and 2008. The authors found one asylum seeker ended up with his leg in a plaster while another – a woman – was pushed through the airport after having allegedly been assaulted.

One man, an Armenian, claimed to have suffered a punctured lung after being kicked and stamped on as he tried to resist deportation by clinging to railings at Heathrow airport. Another, a failed asylum seeker from Cameroon, suffered a dislocated knee while, he alleged, a guard told him: "You will go to your fucking country today, we will fucking show you what illegal people deserve in our country."

In both cases complaints were made to police, who decided there was no case to answer. Nearly half of the alleged assaults – 48% – occurred in the airport before the detainee was taken to the plane, while around a quarter took placed "on the aeroplane before take-off".